Saint Augustine

Saint Augustine
CHRISTIAN BISHOP AND THEOLOGIAN

ALSO KNOWN AS

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Aurelius Augustinus

BORN

November 13, 354

Souk-Ahras, Algeria

DIED

August 28, 430

Annaba, Algeria

NOTABLE WORKS

The City of God

Saint Augustine, also called Saint Augustine of Hippo, original Latin

name Aurelius Augustinus (born Nov. 13, 354, Tagaste, Numidia [now
Souk Ahras, Algeria]died Aug. 28, 430, Hippo Regius [now Annaba,
Algeria]), feast day August 28, bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, one of the
Latin Fathers of the Church, one of the Doctors of the Church, and perhaps
the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul.
Augustines adaptation of classical thought to Christian teaching created a
theological system of great power and lasting influence. His numerous
written works, the most important of which are Confessions and City of
God, shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation
for much of medieval and modern Christian thought.
Augustine is remarkable for what he did and extraordinary for what he
wrote. If none of his written works had survived, he would still have been a
figure to be reckoned with, but his stature would have been more nearly
that of some of his contemporaries. However, more than five million words
of his writings survive, virtually all displaying the strength and sharpness of
his mind (and some limitations of range and learning) and some possessing
the rare power to attract and hold the attention of readers in both his day
and ours. His distinctive theological style shaped Latin Christianity in a way
surpassed only by scripture itself. His work continues to hold contemporary
relevance, in part because of his membership in a religious group that was
dominant in the West in his time and remains so today.
Intellectually, Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the
ancient Platonic tradition with Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin
Christian world. Augustine received the Platonic past in a far more limited
and diluted way than did many of his Greek-speaking contemporaries, but
his writings were so widely read and imitated throughout Latin Christendom
that his particular synthesis of Christian, Roman, and Platonic traditions
defined the terms for much later tradition and debate. Both modern Roman
Catholic and Protestant Christianity owe much to Augustine, though in
some ways each community has at times been embarrassed to own up to
that allegiance in the face of irreconcilable elements in his thought. For
example, Augustine has been cited as both a champion of human freedom
and an articulate defender of divine predestination, and his views on
sexuality were humane in intent but have often been received as
oppressive in effect.

Life Overview

Augustine was born in Tagaste, a modest Roman community in a river

valley 40 miles (64 km) from the African coast. It lay just a few miles short of
the point where the veneer of Roman civilization thinned out in the
highlands of Numidia in the way the American West opens before a traveler
leaving the Mississippi River valley. Augustines parents were of the
respectable class of Roman society, free to live on the work of others, but
their means were sometimes straitened. They managed, sometimes on
borrowed money, to acquire a first-class education for Augustine, and,
although he had at least one brother and one sister, he seems to have been
the only child sent off to be educated. He studied first in Tagaste, then in the
nearby university town of Madauros, and finally at Carthage, the great city
of Roman Africa. After a brief stint teaching in Tagaste, he returned to
Carthage to teach rhetoric, the premier science for the Roman gentleman,
and he was evidently very good at it.
While still at Carthage, he wrote a short philosophical book aimed at
displaying his own merits and advancing his career; unfortunately, it is lost.
At the age of 28, restless and ambitious, Augustine left Africa in 383 to
make his career in Rome. He taught there briefly before landing a plum
appointment as imperial professor of rhetoric at Milan. The customary
residence of the emperor at the time, Milan was the de facto capital of the
Western Roman Empire and the place where careers were best made.
Augustine tells us that he, and the many family members with him,
expected no less than a provincial governorship as the eventualand
lucrativereward for his merits.
Augustines career, however, ran aground in Milan. After only two years
there, he resigned his teaching post and, after some soul-searching and
apparent idleness, made his way back to his native town of Tagaste. There
he passed the time as a cultured squire, looking after his family property,
raising the son, Adeodatus, left him by his long-term lover (her name is
unknown) taken from the lower classes, and continuing his literary
pastimes. The death of that son while still an adolescent left Augustine with
no obligation to hand on the family property, and so he disposed of it and
found himself, at age 36, literally pressed into service against his will as a
junior clergyman in the coastal city of Hippo, north of Tagaste.
BRITANNICA LISTS & QUIZZES
The transformation was not entirely surprising. Augustine had always been
a dabbler in one form or another of the Christian religion, and the collapse
of his career at Milan was associated with an intensification of religiosity. All
his writings from that time onward were driven by his allegiance to a
particular form of Christianity both orthodox and intellectual. His
coreligionists in North Africa accepted his distinctive stance and style with
some difficulty, and Augustine chose to associate himself with the official
branch of Christianity, approved by emperors and reviled by the most
enthusiastic and numerous branches of the African church. Augustines
literary and intellectual abilities, however, gave him the power to articulate
his vision of Christianity in a way that set him apart from his African
contemporaries. His unique gift was the ability to write at a high theoretical
level for the most discerning readers and still be able to deliver sermons
with fire and fierceness in an idiom that a less cultured audience could
admire.
Made a presbyter (roughly, a priest, but with less authority than modern
clergy of that title) at Hippo in 391, Augustine became bishop there in 395
or 396 and spent the rest of his life in that office. Hippo was a trading city,
without the wealth and culture of Carthage or Rome, and Augustine was
never entirely at home there. He would travel to Carthage for several
months of the year to pursue ecclesiastical business in a milieu more
welcoming to his talents than that of his adopted home city.
Augustines educational background and cultural milieu trained him for the
art of rhetoric: declaring the power of the self
through speech that differentiated the speaker from his fellows and swayed
the crowd to follow his views. That Augustines training and natural talent
coincided is best seen in an episode when he was in his early 60s and
found himself quelling by force of personality and words an incipient riot
while visiting the town of Caesarea Mauretanensis. The style of the
rhetorician carried over in his ecclesiastical persona throughout his career.
He was never without controversies to fight, usually with others of his own
religion. In his years of rustication and early in his time at Hippo, he wrote
book after book attacking Manichaeism, a Christian sect he had joined in
his late teens and left 10 years later when it became impolitic to remain with
them. For the next 20 years, from the 390s to the 410s, he was preoccupied
with the struggle to make his own brand of Christianity prevail over all
others in Africa. The native African Christian tradition had fallen afoul of the
Christian emperors who succeeded Constantine (reigned 305337) and
was reviled as schismatic; it was branded with the name of Donatism after
Donatus, one of its early leaders. Augustine and his chief colleague in the
official church, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage, fought a canny and relentless
campaign against it with their books, with their recruitment of support
among church leaders, and with careful appeal to Roman officialdom. In
411 the reigning emperor sent an official representative to Carthage to
settle the quarrel. A public debate held in three sessions during June 18
and attended by hundreds of bishops on each side ended with a ruling in
favour of the official church. The ensuing legal restrictions on Donatism
decided the struggle in favour of Augustines party.
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Even then, approaching his 60th year, Augustine foundor manufactured

a last great challenge for himself. Taking umbrage at the implicationsof
the teachings of a traveling society preacher named Pelagius, Augustine
gradually worked himself up to a polemical fever over ideas that Pelagius
may or may not have espoused. Other churchmen of the time were
perplexed and reacted with some caution to Augustine, but he persisted,
even reviving the battle against austere monks and dignified bishops
through the 420s. At the time of his death, he was at work on a vast and
shapeless attack on the last and most urbane of his opponents, the Italian
bishop Julian of Eclanum.